The Congressional Budget Office has released its score for that terrible Trumpcare bill that Paul Ryan and his Galtian cronies passed about forty-seven years three weeks ago, and in a grimly unsurprisingly development, is just as mind-bogglingly cruel as predicted. The CBO predicts that the bill, if enacted into law, would insure 14 million fewer people than the Affordable Care Act next year—a number expected to balloon to 19 million in 2020 and 23 million by 2026.

These numbers are godawful, but they are just the headline. The report goes on to estimate that Trumpcare will trim $119 billion from the federal deficit, a fact that sounds good until you look at how it accomplishes such an impressive feat:

Yes, Republicans want to cut Medicaid spending—something that President Trump swore he'd never do, but whatever—and eliminate funding for subsidies that help lower-income people purchase health insurance, which would together save a cool $1.1 trillion. You may notice that that number is lower than the $119 billion figure mentioned above, and you may be wondering where all that money goes. But we are talking about Paul Ryan here, so spiritually, you already know. From the report:

The largest increases in the deficit would come from repealing or
modifying tax provisions in the ACA that are not directly related to
health insurance coverage—such as repealing a surtax on net investment
income, repealing annual fees imposed on health insurers, and reducing
the income threshold for determining the tax deduction for medical
expenses.

The CBO goes on to note that although it expects modest declines in health insurance premiums, those reductions can be attributed primarily to the fact that insurance would pay for fewer things, and the benefits would accrue disproportionately to younger people. Older Americans are, to use a technical term, fucked. Look at the far-right column of this table, which casually predicts that, depending on which state they live in, lower-income 64-year-olds could see their net premiums increase by nearly 10 times.

Just in case that point wasn't clear:

Although the agencies expect that the legislation would increase the
number of uninsured broadly, the increase would be
disproportionately larger among older people with lower
income—particularly people between 50 and 64 years old with income of
less than 200 percent of the federal poverty level (see Figure 2).

Does Paul Ryan give a shit about the human cost of fulfilling his fratboy wet dream? He does not. He took to Twitter to happily tout the predictions of premium decreases and deficit reduction, apparently hoping to God that the American people are too stupid to see through his willfully misleading nonsense. (The reply ratio on this thing, incidentally, is art.)

In sum: the GOP's idea of "health care reform" is taking hundreds of billions of dollars away from older, lower-income people and using it to ease the tax burden on insurance companies and the very rich. It is a breathtakingly cruel proposal that is bad for America in almost every conceivable way, and the fact that House Republicans passed it without pretending to care about the impact it would have on the people who put them in office tells you everything you need to know about where their priorities really lie.